The Scenario:
A large domestic company was expanding its services to clients and
partners by granting them access to some of its internal systems. The
client’s IT operations were decentralized, and the company wanted us to
help it move quickly to a centralized model offering additional
services and a more efficient operation.
Our Approach:
We began by working closely with the company to document its technical environment, including its systems, networks and data flows.Our client had divided its systems into a number of separate security zones, with little or no interaction between them. This severely limited the systems’ ability to work in a unified way. What’s more, it made the design needlessly complicated, and increased overhead for management.
It’s our experience that when systems are walled off from each other, the reasons often have nothing to do with technology. So we set out to discover why this particular structure looked the way it did.
Working backwards from the system layout itself, we were able to pinpoint the key concerns that had shaped it over time, including matters of policy, governance and regulatory concerns. Through a series of workshops with the client, including conversations with several business units we identified their business concerns and long term objectives. Once we had identified the issues our client cared most about, we could draw up a comprehensive plan for addressing them more efficiently.